GETTING TO SLEEP

How to Fall Asleep Faster

Sleeping tips to help you wind down

After an action-packed day—or one equally packed with worry—your brain needs some time to catch up, to make order of things, and to slow its frenetic firing before you’re ready to sleep. Pure bodily exhaustion can probably get you at least that first hour of dozing, but then worries will rise to the surface and cause you to have trouble sleeping. So, how can you get your mind to chill out so that your body can too?

“We need to learn to apply the brakes before the car is in the garage,” says Rubin Naiman, Ph.D., a sleep and dream specialist at Andrew Weil’s Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. “Clearing your head is key to a good night of sleep.” Simply taking 15 minutes to sit quietly, meditate, pray, do rhythmic breathing, or yoga can allow your mind to slow down enough to have a better sleep.

Want to know how to fall sleep? Establish any ritual that you do before bed—taking a bath, sipping a cup of (decaf) tea, anything but checking your e-mail—will do more than relax you right then and there. The repetition also conditions your brain and body for sleep, says Jeffrey Thompson, director of the Center for Neuroacoustic Research in Encinitas, California.

While you’re transitioning to Z-mode the same way night after night, you’re also creating a Pavlovian response to your ritual. So simply sitting in the spot where you do your mindful breathing or turning on the bath water signals your mind that it will be sleeping soon, Thompson says.

Another way to condition yourself sleepward is to play off the body’s internal clock. Dr. Naiman suggests simulating dusk about an hour before you plan to go to bed by dimming the lights significantly. This triggers natural circadian rhythms that help us prepare for sleep.

Guess who has stress under the covers with them most often? That would be women. “Women tend to take stress to bed and mull over it,” says Joyce Walsleben, Ph.D., associate professor at New York University School of Medicine and author of A Woman’s Guide to Sleep.

To keep it from waking you up, she suggests keeping a worry book—a journal where a couple of hours before bed, you write down the thoughts you might stew over. Then, she says, when those thoughts creep into your head later, say to yourself, “I can’t improve upon it today, so I’m not thinking about it.” You have your To Be Worried About list, and when you can act on it you will.

Other experts recommend literally kicking those worries out of the bedroom. Physically take the journal to another room and leave it ‘til morning. (Make it sleep on the couch, as it were.)